Once a fundamental concept in early-modern medicine and philosophy, sympathy has re-emerged as a subject of investigation in a wide range of modern disciplines. The long history of sympathy is marked by extensive transmission between fields, from astronomy to medical theory, from moral treatises to the novel, from psychoanalysis and literature to neuro-psychology and criminology. It is one of the aims of our conference to begin to chart this territory in which early-modern and enlightenment models of fellow-feeling, compassion, and commiseration are taken up in modern science, fiction, film, and social policy; and to explore how these models are re-worked in conjunction with new constructs like empathy, altruism, and humanitarianism. Thus alongside a historical understanding of sympathy and its cognates, we wish to investigate how these concepts become normative, yet ambivalent, social formations today. In bringing together researchers from diverse disciplines, we shall also address methodological questions acutely problematised in the study of feelings and affects: the legacy of objectivity in the sciences and the humanities, the transmission of sympathy across cultures, the break-down and suppression of other-regarding feelings at the time of war, violence, and genocide, and the appeal to or the erasure of affects in the rise of disciplines.

Papers will address these specific topics:
- the co-presence of altruism and cruelty in human nature
- the secret of sentimental tearjerkers from the eighteenth century to modern cinema
- the heritage of eighteenth-century moral thought
- literary representations of sympathy
- the question of affect and professional neutrality in medicine and criminology
- the place of empathy and altruism in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
- the role of the media in humanitarian activity
- the scientific basis for altruistic behaviour as seen in today’s most recent bio-medical research
- self and other: tolerance, intolerance, othering, and discrimination
- sympathy and politics; individual and collective evildoing; war, violence, genocide
- the poetics and aesthetics of sympathy
- society, sociability and the sympathetic bond
- the debate on compassion fatigue, or when the sight of suffering becomes too familiar